Mountain gloom and mountain glory
Subtitle: the development of the aesthetics of the infinite
By: Marjorie Hope Nicolson ; with a foreword by William Cronon.
Series: Weyerhaeuser environmental classics
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Seattle
Language: eng
Number of pages: 403
Subjects: English poetry -- History and criticism.; Mountains in literature.; Infinite in literature.; Nature in literature.; Aesthetics, British.
Description: To English poets and writers of the seventeenth century, as to their predecessors, mountains were ugly protuberances which disfigured nature and threatened the symmetry of earth; they were symbols of God's wrath. Yet, less than two centuries later the romantic poets sang in praise of mountain splendor, of glorious heights that stirred their souls to divine ecstasy.

In this very readable and fascinating study, Marjorie Hope Nicolson considers the intellectual renaissance at the close of the seventeenth century that caused the shift from mountain gloom to mountain glory. She examines various writers from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and traces both the causes and the process of this drastic change in perception.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.